how to be smarter — 4 steps drafted at my desk

it is currently 10:18am on a tuesday. i’m at my desk, between two emails i will not answer. carla is in the call with the agency on the third floor. i have, conservatively, until they come back. and what i am doing in those minutes — which my contract would, on a careful reading, not authorise — is sitting here trying to figure out how to be smarter. the search has been ongoing. the results, as you’ll see, are mixed.

at my desk. carla is in the agency call on the third floor. fifty minutes, if i’m being optimistic, and i usually am.

so. how to be smarter. i looked it up, of course. people are very confident, online, about how to be smarter. they recommend audiobooks, cold showers, journals, and reading more on a kindle than on paper. i’m not going to do any of those things. what i am going to do is propose four steps that have, in my own private experiment, occasionally produced the appearance of being smarter, which is, i suspect, what most of us are actually after.

how to be smarter — the working steps. (1) define what “smarter” means to you, ideally without consulting a dictionary; (2) ask a person who has nothing to gain from your answer (the barista works); (3) sit somewhere with witnesses but no obligation, like the corner of a bar; (4) write nothing down for ten minutes — the silence is the work. that’s the method. it has not yet made me smarter, but it has, on three occasions, made me feel briefly less stupid, which i’ll take.

SMARTER. IS. NOT. A. PILL.

that goes on the wall before we open the steps. there is a cinematic version of this idea — see the 2011 film “limitless”, in which bradley cooper takes a clear pill and learns mandarin in an afternoon — but the cinematic version, like most cinematic versions, is a lie that costs $14 million per minute to maintain. the rest of us are working with whatever we had at breakfast.

how to be smarter, the short version

the short version of how to be smarter is this: pick something you already do, and do it slightly more deliberately. that’s it. that’s the whole post, technically. you could close the tab now and you would have received your money’s worth, given that you did not pay any money. but you’re still here, which means you, like me, suspect the short version is too short. so we’ll go long.

everything else in this post is just elaboration. four steps. each step takes a few minutes. none of them require a kindle. one of them requires a barista, but only briefly.

step one, define smarter without a dictionary

this is the step everyone skips. people decide they want to be smarter without specifying what kind of smarter. faster at math? more confident in meetings? quicker with comebacks? better at remembering names? these are different skills. some of them are mutually exclusive. you cannot, for example, be the person who remembers everyone’s name AND the person who has cutting comebacks ready, because remembering names requires warmth and cutting comebacks require contempt. pick one.

i, for the record, picked “the person who has a quick comeback” in 2019. by 2022 i had a wip list of 47 comebacks i had thought of in the shower, none of which i had used, because none of the original conversations were available for replay. the wip 2022 list is, technically, still open. it has not received attention. that’s a different post.

the lesson: define smarter narrowly. a narrow definition is a real one. a wide definition is a wish. a wide definition is also, structurally, a magnet for confirmation bias — if “smarter” can mean anything, then everything you do, including buying a third yoga mat, can be filed under it.

step two, ask the barista

this step is real. find someone who serves you something regularly — a barista works, a bartender works, the woman at the dry cleaner works — and ask them what they think you should know more about. they have watched you, in their professional capacity, longer than you’d think. they have data. they have, in a way, a clinical view.

my barista — and she does not know my name, which is a kind of dignity — said, when i asked, “you should learn how to ask for things without saying sorry first.” i thought that was beneath me. then i tried it for a week. she was right. she has been right twice this year. she does not get a tip larger than 12% — i hold the line — but she gets, occasionally, my respect. that is also a thing.

step three, sit at the corner with mike’s empty seat

this is the bar step. mike has a seat at the corner of a bar i go to. mike (who, by his own admission, has not filed a return in roughly five years) gives that seat a kind of philosophical gravity. when mike isn’t there, the seat is, technically, available, and the lighting is bad enough that nobody notices a man sitting alone with a glass of water and a notebook. you should be that man, occasionally. that’s the step.

what you do at the corner is: nothing. you watch. you listen. you do not bring a phone. you order one drink. you stay for forty minutes. the goal is to overhear three conversations and have, by the end, a slightly different theory of the world than you arrived with. it works more often than you’d guess. people, in bars, mid-week, give themselves away in ways they do not in offices. you are, in this step, a small civilian anthropologist.

related: i am, on tuesdays, against the human practice of ironing. ironing is a class war i refuse to fight. i mention this because the man two seats down from mike’s empty seat last thursday was wearing a freshly ironed shirt and was, in my unscientific observation, the least convincing person in the room. correlation is not causation. but the take stands.

step four, write down nothing, briefly

everyone tells you to keep a journal. they’re wrong, or at least premature. the journal step works only if you have already done step three, because otherwise you are journaling about feelings, which is a closed loop with no new data entering. step four is to sit at your desk — like i am now, like you might be — for ten minutes and write nothing. then write one sentence. then put the pen down.

the sentence should be the smallest correct thing you noticed today. not a profound observation. not a quote you read. just the smallest correct thing. mine, today, is “i can wait until carla gets back, but i am not actually working in this gap, i am performing waiting“. that’s it. that’s the sentence. it isn’t smarter, exactly. but it’s a real sentence, and the act of writing one real sentence is, in my private theory, more useful than the seven hundred fake ones the kindle people would have you read.

and yes, i’d put real money on this being more useful than reading another book about the difference between dumb and stupid, which i wrote about last week and which clarified, mostly, my own diagnosis. one real sentence today. tomorrow, possibly, two.

verdict — smarter is a verb i conjugate badly

the agency wrapped early. someone in the meeting made handouts on actual paper, which i find slightly menacing. carla is at her desk now, holding hers, reading.

the wip 2022 list, since this morning, has gained one item: “use the four-step method on a real question”. whether i will close that item, you and i both know, is unlikely. it will sit there, for a while, with the other forty-six.

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